Plunging hard and heavy across the swampy flesh of Gray.
He moved easily, bouncing with each stride in the light gravity, down an infinite straight line between rows of enormous trees. Vegetable trees, these were, soft tubers and floppy leaves in the wan glow of a filtered sun. There should be no men here, only machines to tend the crops. Then he noticed that he was not a man at all. A robo- hauler, yes-and his legs were in fact wheels, his arms the working grapplers. Yet he read all this as his running body. Somehow it was pleasant.
And she ran with him.
He saw beside him a miner-bot, speeding down the slope. Yet he knew it was she, Martine, and he loved her.
He whirred, clicked-and sent a hail.
You are fair, my sweet.
Back from the lumbering miner came, This body will not work well at games of lust.
No reason we can’t shed them in time.
To what end? she demanded. Always imperious, that girl.
To slide silky skin again.
You seem to forget that we are fleeing. That cop, someone will find him.
In fact, he had forgotten. Uh… update me?
Ah! How exasperating! You’ve been off, romping through your imputs again, right?
Worse than that. He had only a slippery hold on the jiggling, surging lands of mud and murk that funneled past. Best not to alarm her, though. My sensations seem to have become a bit scrambled, yes. I know there is some reason to run-
They are right behind us!
Who?
The Majiken Clan! They want to seize you as a primary manifestation!
Damn! I’m fragmenting.
You mean they’re reaching into your associative cortex?
Must be, my love. Which is why you’re running with me.
What do you mean?
How to tell her the truth but shade it so that she does not guess… the Truth? Suppose I tell you something that is more useful than accurate?
Why would you do that, m’love?
Why do doctors slant a diagnosis?
Because no good diagnostic gives a solid prediction.
Exactly. Not what he had meant, but it got them by an awkward fact.
Come on, she sent. Let’s scamper down this canyon. The topo maps say it’s a shortcut.
Can’t trust ’em, the rains slice up the land so fast. He felt his legs springing like pistons in the mad buoyance of adrenaline.
They surged together down slippery sheets that festered with life-spreading algae, some of the many-leafed slim-trees Benjan had himself helped design. Rank growths festooned the banks of dripping slime, biology run wild and woolly at a fevered pace, irked by infusions of smart bugs. A landscape on fast forward.
What do you fear so much? she said suddenly.
The sharpness of it stalls his mind. He was afraid for her more than himself, but how to tell her? This apparition of her was so firm and heartbreakingly warm, her whole presence welling through to him on his sensorium… Time to tell another truth that conceals a deeper truth.
They’ll blot out every central feature of me, all those they can find.
If they catch you. Us.
Yup. Keep it to monosyllables, so the tremor of his voice does not give itself away. If they got to her, she would face final, total erasure. Even of a fragment self.
Save your breath for the run, she sent. So he did, gratefully.
If there were no omni-sensors lurking along this approach to the launch fields, they might get through. Probably Fleet expected him to stay indoors, hiding, working his way to some help. But there would be no aid there. The Majiken were thorough and would capture all human manifestations, timing the arrests simultaneously to prevent anyone sending a warning. That was why they had sent a lone cop to grab him; they were stretched thin. Reassuring, but not much.
It was only three days past the 3D interview, yet they had decided to act and put together a sweep. What would they be doing to the station itself? He ached at the thought. After all, she resided there…
And she was here. He was talking to a manifestation that was remarkable, because he had opened his inputs in a way that only a crisis can spur.
Benjan grimaced. Decades working over Gray had aged him, taught him things Fleet could not imagine. The Sabal Game still hummed in his mind, still guided his thoughts, but these men of the Fleet had betrayed all that. They thought, quite probably, that they could recall him to full officer status, and he would not guess that they would then silence him, quite legally.
Did they think him so slow? Benjan allowed himself a thin, dry chuckle as he ran.
They entered the last short canyon before the launch fields. Tall blades like scimitar grasses poked up, making him dart among them. She growled and spun her tracks and plowed them under. She did not speak. None of them liked to destroy the life so precariously remaking Gray. Each crushed blade was a step backward.
His quarters were many kilometers behind by now, and soon these green fields would end. If he had judged the map correctly-yes, there it was. A craggy peak ahead, crowned with the somber lights of the launch station. They would be operating a routine shift in there, not taking any special precautions.
Abruptly, he burst from the thicket of thick-leafed plants and charged down the last slope. Before him lay the vast lava plain of Oberg Plateau, towering above the Fogg Sea. Now it was a mud flat, foggy, littered with ships. A vast dark hole yawned in the bluff nearby, the slanting sunlight etching its rimmed locks. It must be the exit tube for the electromagnetic accelerator, now obsolete, unable to fling any more loads of ore through the cloak of atmosphere.
A huge craft loomed at the base of the bluff. A cargo vessel probably; far too large and certainly too slow. Beyond lay an array of robot communications vessels, without the bubble of a life support system. He rejected those, too, ran on.
She surged behind him. They kept electromagnetic silence now.
His breath came faster and he sucked at the thick, cold air, then had to stop for a moment in the shadow of the cruiser to catch his breath. Above he thought he could make out the faint green tinge of the atmospheric cap in the membrane that held Gray’s air. He would have to find his way out through the holes in it, too, in an unfamiliar ship.
He glanced around, searching. To the side stood a small craft, obviously Jump type. No one worked at its base. In the murky fog that shrouded the mud flat he could see a few men and robo-servers beside nearby ships. They would wonder what he was up to. He decided to risk it. He broke from cover and ran swiftly to the small ship. The hatch opened easily.
Gaining lift with the ship was not simple, and so he called on his time-sense accelerations, to the max. That would cost him mental energy later. Right now, he wanted to be sure there was a later at all.
Roaring flame drove him into the pearly sky.
Finding the exit hole in the membrane proved easier. He flew by pure eye-balled grace, slamming the acceleration until it was nearly a straight-line problem, like shooting a rifle. Fighting a mere sixth of a g had many advantages.
And now, where to go?
A bright arc flashed behind Benjan’s eyelids, showing the fans of purpling blood vessels. He heard the dark, whispering sounds of an inner void. A pit opened beneath him and the falling sensation began-he had run over the boundaries this body could attain. His mind had overpowered the shrieking demands of the muscles and nerves, and now he was shutting down, harking to the body’s calls…
And she?
I am here, in love. The voice came warm and moist, wrapping him in it as he faded, faded, into a gray of his
